LEARN ABOUT ME
Larry Enzer
History
Web Design has changed a lot since Monmouth Web Developers first opened in 2004. I will highlight some of my most interesting websites I've built over the years. In 2003 I was fairly young. Well, not that younger, but young nonetheless.
I was using bulletin board services to access news websites, dial-up modems were slow and Personal Digital Assistant devices were the norm during that time. Accessing the Internet was slow and cumbersome. People weren't connected to their computer all day. Below is a brief look at what web design looked like through the years.
Top Online Companies: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Etsy, LinkedIn
Top Technology: ITunes, IPod, JQuery, Embedded Fonts
My first website as Monmouth Web Developers. I hand coded this website from top to bottom. Back then you had to accommodate each computer, the browser capabilities, screen sizes and internet access speeds. Most web surfers had slow dial-up modems, small computer screens and early versions of browsers which were often buggy.
A website may work well on one computer, with a specific browser, but would break on another computer with a competing browser. Each web browser had its own capabilities. During this time, larger companies often designed intranets that were advanced corporate web portals that could rely on the latest technology provided they allowed only certain browsers to be used to access their websites.
I've worked with The Jettyrats since 1999 and updated it often [up to about 2011]. It was one of my first dynamic website. In 2004 the website contained embedded fonts which were first being introduced. It was buggy, slow and often made browsing a website not as fluid. Web designers often preloaded all fonts first, but used no more than three. Previously, a computer had to have the fonts pre-installed on their system, otherwise use a fallback font.
The website also had an Adobe Flash™ based music player which was not used very often by designers due to slow bandwidths, large file sizes and spotty streaming capabilities.
In 2004 I redesigned Monmouth Web Developers. It was at this time that I really started using WordPress to its fullest, even though my website was still mostly hand coded. I was using WordPress a bit more than as a blogging tool. WordPress was becoming a web development powerhouse adding more plugins and capabilities every month. WordPress started to be used in new ways to manage full scale websites.
jQuery was released in 2004 which was a coding gamechanger. The language allowed programmers to access specific sections of a website or DOM [Document Object Model] then tell each section how to look or behave. It was a bold new concept. You could now control every aspect of a website as more standards from the W3C were being introduced, reducing the need for cross-browser support as it was known back then.
Top Online Companies: Hulu, AirBnB, Bing, FanDuel, Dropbox, Soundcloud
Top Technology: Google Chrome, IPhone, Android
Ohr Tikvah JHC was a great website that I designed and maintained from 2007-2009. It was a fun build and a uniquely styled website. The website had to be accessible for all computers and user ability. The website was built of individual square blocks so when the website loaded on slower systems, looked like bricks being stacked.
The website had a large library of past events, forums, slideshows, cross-browser video libraries, dynamic event calendars, online newsletters. Quite ahead of it's time back in 2007. Google Chrome and smartphones began to be released and more people were upgrading to high speed internet access.
Bungie Energy Drink was a fun website built in 2007. It contained a nice little Adobe Flash™ animation on the first page. The truck would roll in from the side, spin its wheels and zoom off. Music would also play in the background.
The Bungie Energy Drink website had great graphics too. One of my favorite. The website was meant to be a two page, "landing page" style website, with bold graphics, great animations and great background music. Bungie was a local Energy Drink Company that wanted a national launch of their drink.
Anthony Deals was a great website, where you could browse through hundreds of listings to find great savings on products and services you use every day. It was a coupon club. You could browse specific categories, search or have coupons emailed to you directly based on your predetermined shopping preferences.
In 2009, anthonydeals.com started to use the newer distributed font libraries. Websites were now using @font directives to include real fonts for better design flexibility but could access the font libraries from a font server like Google Fonts™.
In 2009 I redesigned my website using a new platform, Joomla™. It was similar to WordPress but had more social media aspects, like blogs, online forums, news aggregators and more. It was buggy and hard to customize fully. WordPress was a more design flexible platform but Joomla™ got the job done when it came to a dynamic news portal or online forum. You could easily transform flat websites into a Social Media giant with customizable user based home pages and message boards.
The downside with Joomla™ was that they went through many changes early on. You had to redesign the website from the ground up after version 2.6 was released. This was a hinderance after working hard getting my design just right, so for web design I went back to mostly using WordPress for my advanced web development needs.
Top Online Companies: Fiverr, GoFundMe, Chewy, MeWe, Instagram
Top Technology: IPad, 4G Network, Responsive Web Design
I worked with Educational Testing Service™ from 2009-2010. I redesigned their GRE testing website which was being split into each state's new local GRE website. It was a new educational regulation. At that time I had to implement 50 separate full scale websites and was one of my first large scale Content Managed System website.
I've worked with McGraw Hill in 2011 right after I finished up with ETS™. It was one of my largest website build. McGraw Hill was splitting up their subsidiaries, getting rid of their publishing and focusing only on data metrics. This included, Dow Jones™, S&P Global™, Dodge™ and JD Power™. They moved their website to a new Corporate Content Management System named Jive™. Jive™ includes a social media aspect to their corporate portal, much like Facebook.
Kids Earning, Learning and Donating or MYKELD.COM was a Joomla™ based website I worked with after the McGraw Hill project was completed. I had fun using the collaborative and dynamic Social Media aspects of Joomla™. I managed their website as well, responding to comments, setting up fund raisers, writing business articles and working with the kids.
Responsive web design was being introduced around this time. A web designer could now write @media sections of their Style Sheets, which controls the look of a website. A web designer could specify a breakpoint or browser width were the elements could be changed to avoid a website from not rendering correctly, and remain intact on all devices. People were also moving to "mobile first web design". More people were accessing websites on newer smartphones, so needed to look great on a phone, first.
Top Online Companies: DoorDash, Politico, Jet.com, LetGo, Giphy
Top Technology: Samsung Galaxy Gear, 3D Printing, VR, Oculus
In 2013 I decided to redesign Monmouth Web Developers using jQueryUI to see how well this language worked. It was during this time I was also working at McGraw Hill. It would be the last time I redesigned my website as a standalone website. Future versions would be exclusively designed in WordPress.
jQueryUI at that time was a good language and added a lot to jQuery, but never fully caught on. It came with a large library of widgets though, and often forced you into specific design decisions. The language had a few benefits though still used today, but not used as much anymore, like drag and drop, sliders, and fancy tooltips.
In 2013 I was rehired to redesign the McGraw Hill website using a newer version of Jive™. After the website was redesigned, McGraw Hill kept me on, for another redesign of their website. An even newer version of Jive™ was being released on the cloud. The new environment came with better technology, better development languages and much better interfaces. It was a radical change for Jive™.
After I finished the twice redesign and after leaving McGraw Hill, my first boss, hired me to redesign a large scale Pension Fund Management Company's website, which I am not legally allowed to disclose. My ex-boss' Company, he and his boss were now running, was also using Jive™.
Monmouth Web Developers' has changed many times over the years, always trying to stay ahead of new programing languages and technologies. This time I decided to completely redesign my website using WordPress alone, and I have been developing websites exclusively in WordPress ever since. Faster development times, greater design flexibility and a powerful new back end added greater functionality to an otherwise static website. From Realtor websites to hosting live events or launching a dynamic web store, WordPress could now handle a lot more.
In 2018 I wanted to give my website a fresh modern look, after 23 years of static Web Design and Development. WordPress has evolved a lot since its first release in 2003/2004 and now relies on much better web design standards which I wanted to reflect in a clean, modern responsive way.
All of my websites were now being branded as "Mobile First Designs", something I learned while at McGraw Hill. More people began accessing websites from smart phones exclusively and websites needed to reflect this. Large desktop computers were now becoming mostly relics of the past. Monmouth Web Developers' website also used background videos on my home page which was a nice attention grabber.
In 2019, I decided to make my website more technically oriented and include some back end services I could offer or sell, from hosting to email marketing. The website used WooCommerce, a powerful WordPress based shopping cart and GoDaddy™ for the server products to list and sell. It made my website slow and hard to work with and I never wanted to become a hosting account manager.
I then decided to focus on building great WordPress websites in only 5 days. I got rid of my GoDaddy™ Reseller Account and now focus solely on building great websites using WordPress which almost every hosting account could now install easily. My new website is a great example of a well built theme that I can now fully customize from top to bottom.
Choose A Package And Book Your Service.
FIVE DAY WEBSITE
- Configure all plugins as required
- Brand your website with your logo
- Design your website
- Update images on your website
- Include social media Icons
- Configure contact page
- Modify menus, headers and footers
- Add sections from other themes
- Responsive web design on all pages
- Add up to 2 legal pages
TWO WEEK WEB SHOP
- Configure all plugins as required
- Brand your website with your logo
- Design your web shop
- Update images on your web shop
- Include social media links
- Configure contact pages
- Modify menus, headers and footers
- Responsive web design on all pages
- Add up to 25 unique items to shop
- Add up to 2 legal pages